Claiming The Cowboy: Meier Ranch Brothers Book Three

by North, Leslie

  Chase climbed into his truck seat and fired the engine. Never had he been so grateful for his loud muffler. He depressed the gas because the full-bodied knocking in his ears balanced the chaos inside.

  Gretchen’s hair had fallen from its perfect twist in a glorious torrent. Her disarray was exceptional, beautiful, the real her struggling beneath her carefully-crafted shell, but he couldn’t do it anymore. She yelled.

  “I’ll help you find another property, outside the town limits, if the vote doesn’t swing your way next time.”

  He slammed his truck door closed and said, “There won’t be a next time,” to no one, to himself. Reverse gear to drive, Chase peeled out of the city hall parking lot, breaking every goddamned law he could.

  Close Call’s Sesquicentennial Days transcended all of Gretchen’s hopes. Crowds came for mouth-watering food, that small-town connection, and fun that incorporated all ages—from little ones pitching balls at the dunk tank to groups of college kids looking to snag the grand prize in The Amazing Close Call Race and celebrate with some specialty whiskey to seniors who preferred classic cars and a tour of historic homes. The final event, a concert by Jett Duncan, two-time country music award nominee and friend to Gabriel and Maria Mendez’s son, left visitors grinning all the way through the fireworks that Chase’s company had splurged on to cap off the weekend.

  For what Chase had been able to pull off in such a short time, Gretchen was awed and grateful. And shattered.

  She stood alone on the edge of the concert grounds, surveying the mass exodus, listening to the occasional chirp from her walkie-talkie—something from the police or fire chief, none of it requiring her intervention. At least for now. She had glimpsed Chase earlier in the day. He pretended not to see her. Somehow squeezing in an apology while flipping pancakes for charity didn’t seem fitting.

  All weekend, investors and corporate scouts had sought her out, shoved business cards in her hand, talked big about how Close Call knew how to throw a celebration and how it was exactly the kind of town that might give their employees great quality of life. Everything from mom-and-pop plumbing businesses to international hotel chains looking for a new place to expand the budget-conscious arm of their empire. Gretchen should have been sky-high, riding the joy that the event brought to so many, reveling in an outcome far beyond anything she’d hoped for. And she was. In theory. In appearances. She just hadn’t quite figured out how to align her ambitions with her wants.

  And she wanted Chase.

  Not because he was no longer hers. And not because he made her feel things she had pushed aside in the pursuit of her goals for so long. Every single thing that had gone right in the past month had been a direct result of her loosening the reins on her agenda, embracing the unplanned, occasionally breaking the rules for the bigger picture. His instincts led to the attorney general’s house, to a celebration worthy of the town’s spirit, to her conquering fears and moving past the hurt of isolation she should have moved past when she was eight.

  Bad boy, fuck-off Chase Meier was the absolute worst companion for an upwardly-mobile politician hell-bent on election to Austin, but he was the absolute best companion for her. Gretchen. The woman who didn’t curse because she thought her mom might hear. The woman who sat on the sidelines of too many rodeos in favor of books and learning. The woman given a role of privilege who too often slipped into a mindset of burden without someone around to remind her to breathe, even if only for eight seconds.

  Gretchen’s father came over, two folding chairs in hand. She wasn’t sure how he got them to her or where they came from, but she had never been happier to get off her heels. He wrenched them both open, settled into his chair, opposite hers, and glanced out over the vacant field littered with unimaginable trash that gave her a near-coronary simply looking at it.

  “Mess, huh?” she said.

  “You look out and see empty cups and stepped-on funnel cakes and plastic containers filled with nacho cheese that looks radioactive. But that’s not what I see.”

  “What do you see?”

  “Fun,” he said. “And a few brassieres.”

  Precisely how Chase would have described it. Gretchen surprised herself when she said it aloud. She smiled, for maybe the first time that day, as Gretchen. It felt good, this authentic side, when no one was looking. Chase was right—she was two different people. Chase was right about a lot of things.

  “I don’t pretend to know what went on between you two,” said her father. “Don’t guess it’s any of my business. But remember what I told you a long time ago, before you even decided to get into politics?”

  “‘The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it,’” she quoted. “Thoreau.”

  “How much life did you exchange for all this?”

  Gretchen glanced out and saw empty cups and radioactive cheese and brassieres. Certainly nothing worth exchanging for Chase. Hell, she was hard-pressed to figure out what she got out of something that once seemed so important. A pocket full of business cards? A popularity she already enjoyed with the townspeople? She wondered if the same would be true down the road, when she became attorney general. Would her life, the things she exchanged to get there, be nothing but forgotten cups in an abandoned field?

  Her father continued. “Seems you spend most of your days trying to convince people you have a life that exudes character and sets an example and upholds promises and chases all the right things and captures perfection.”

  “What’s wrong with all that?”

  “You spend so much time convincing, you forget to actually live,” he said. “Ah. It’s politics. A chess match, like I always told you. The advantage’ll change a dozen times during the game. You didn’t do anything wrong, far as I can see.”

  “I kept the knowledge in my hip pocket. An alternate, if things didn’t go my way.”

  “Always were prepared.”

  “If being attorney general means I hurt people I care about along the way, I shouldn’t want it so much.”

  “No, I don’t reckon you should.”

  She smiled, for the second time that day, as Gretchen. “Are you going to agree with everything I say?”

  “Only the things that make sense.”

  From a distance, they watched Jett Duncan’s roadies pack up the stage and load trailers.

  “I miss Mom,” she said.

  As soon as the words left her mouth, a chill swept over her, leaving goosebumps in its wake, scalp to toes. An April night in Texas, nothing more.

  Her father reached over and took her hand.

  “Me, too, Pumpkin.”

  That night, Gretchen didn’t have the energy to do more than watch The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, one of her father’s favorite Clint Eastwood westerns, alongside him and be the slobber stand for Lincoln, who took up more than his share of the couch and snored inside some doggy dreamland every time a pistol fired. Long about news time, Darcy knocked on their door.

  She didn’t wait for it to be answered. No one in Close Call did, really. Their lock had been broken for years.

  “Turn on the news, turn on the news!” She charged in, not unlike an air raid siren, headed straight for the remote. Blondie and Tuco and Angel Eyes had just started their epic eight-minute stare-down anyway.

  A reporter Gretchen recognized as someone a Houston affiliate had sent up to Close Call to cover the sesquicentennial filled the screen. Gretchen had granted her an interview near the statue at noon. The chyron read: Scandal Rocks Close Call. Beauty Queen Mayor Under Investigation.

  Somehow, the beauty queen part pissed Gretchen off the most. It wasn’t a lie, exactly—one pageant to help pay for college—but it reduced her every success to a result of her appearance.

  On the tail end of the spliced footage from the day’s events, Gretchen filled the screen, and said, “Close Call has a rich and varied history. There isn’t anything I won’t do.”

  The reporter filled the screen again on a live feed, darkened street. M
ain Street in her town.

  Gretchen’s jaw dropped open. “…to ensure this remains a treasured town for families!” she screamed at the television. Her blood boiled; she paced the room in her fried-egg-looking fuzzy slippers. “They took that sound bite completely out of context. Cut it to fit their story.”

  Lincoln whimpered from her shrill voice.

  Typical media, though she hadn’t been on the ugly side of it before. The reporter signed off with the strong suggestion that Gretchen suppressed information regarding the property on Main because of her personal relations with the one person who stood to lose the most in a lengthy legal battle—rodeo star Chase Meier.

  “There wasn’t time,” whispered Gretchen. “The event,” she added, lamely. Hot tears flooded her eyes.

  Oh God-oh God-oh God. From nowhere came the advice to breathe.

  Breathe, chief. Gretchen sucked in two greedy inhales. Somehow, without Chase there, it didn’t work so well at slowing her racing pulse.

  The landline in the kitchen rang. Her cell phone buzzed across the coffee table.

  Immediately, her stomach spun like a Tilt-A-Whirl.

  “I feel like I ate radioactive cheese,” she said.

  Darcy helped her back to the sofa. “Listen to me. You already got ahead of this. Days ago. Every single person in that city hall has your back, including the city attorney. This is nothing more than a slow news cycle and a grab for ratings. And some apparent jealousy by a reporter with helmet hair.”

  Still the phones rang.

  “You didn’t do anything wrong, Pumpkin. Just another move in the chess match.”

  Gretchen grabbed the remote and stabbed the back button to the movie in time to hear the line about two kinds of people in the world—those with loaded guns and those who dig. None of the characters particularly good or remarkable. Simply a reminder of the lengths to which humans pursue success at any cost.

  Mercilessly, both phones quieted—one to machine, low volume, one to voicemail.

  No one moved. Darcy’s eyes stayed wide. Her father glanced back and forth, screen to daughter. Lincoln blinked one long, protracted Morse code of love.

  Gretchen smiled, a sardonic, bitter smile of disbelief that squeezed unshed tears down her cheeks. “I think I’ll turn in,” she managed in her strongest mayoral voice.

  Four hours into turning in, Gretchen gave up on chasing sleep, went to her desk, and drafted her resignation letter.

  13

  Emile Pickford was the patriarch of one of the most powerful families in Marin County. Equally powerful as the Meier clan in acreage and town influence, Emile had one advantage the Meiers didn’t have: an office in town government. As one of her first acts as elected mayor, Gretchen kept Emile Pickford on as town manager. She didn’t see a reason to change the office when Emile’s vision for the town so closely aligned with hers. Close Call couldn’t part with much of a salary for the man. But the irony of Gretchen having to deliver her resignation letter to a man whose ancestors were screwed over by the Meiers’ ancestors while she, herself, had done the same in her own non-proactive way—history repeating itself and all that—left her feeling like an empty shell of her former self.

  Emile wasn’t much for stuffy offices, though he had one in city hall. It was mostly a place to hang various pictures of him in deer blinds all over the state and throughout Central and South America. If there was one thing at which Emile excelled, it was shooting unsuspecting souls between the eyes. She found him at dawn, in the field where the concert took place, each of them with a trash bag in hand, along with twenty or so other citizens, a few Meiers included, who had shown up simply because something in the town needed done.

  Gretchen shifted her trash bag to her left hand, sniffed away at the early-morning breeze, maybe some tears at the thought of what came next, and pulled the envelope from her hoodie pocket. When she approached, the town manager’s expression turned grave.

  “Emile, I’d like to give you this.”

  He glanced down at his hand, wiped it on his jeans, and took the offering. “What is it?”

  Gretchen straightened, as much pride as she could muster while holding smelly garbage and at the end of a political dream.

  “My resignation. When I took the oath to put this town first—in all things—I meant it. I don’t see how Close Call can move forward under this dark cloud of rumor and innuendo that surrounds me.”

  Emile glanced down at the envelope. He sucked air through his teeth as if he had already downed a hefty breakfast burrito and was still enjoying the parts riding his molars. The toothpick dangling from his lips was entirely for show.

  “This what you want?”

  She’d handed it to him, hadn’t she? But the time for half-truths and delicacy had come and gone. “No. It’s the furthest thing from what I want.”

  Emile nodded, seemingly took forever to process what she had said, then ripped the envelope straight down the middle. A man of few words, he dropped the remnants into his trash bag and moved on to the next offending item of litter on the ground.

  “Why did you do that?” she asked, scrambling after him.

  “I don’t accept it.”

  “You can’t…” She hesitated, stopped short. Could he? She hadn’t exactly run across this mayoral policy before.

  “I can, and I did.”

  “But the news story last night—”

  “Saw it.”

  “And?”

  He shifted the toothpick to the other side of his mouth. “It’ll blow over.”

  “But the legalities alone…”

  “Not if I don’t do a damned thing.”

  Maybe it was the wind curling in her ears or the fact that her head felt like a melon dropped from atop the clock tower, after the punishing night of stress and tears. She understood nothing.

  “What are you saying?”

  “Way I figure it, with the fire and all, I figure there’s plenty of blame to go around. Now, we could all get into a legal battle that would stretch out for a decade. Or we could leave things in the past, where they belong.” Emile reached for a child’s lost shoe and shoved it in his bag. “Tell Meier he can keep the property. One condition.”

  Now she was way beyond understanding.

  “What’s that?”

  “Chase takes me on as a silent investor. I figure most of his capital is tied up in inventory. ’Bout damned time we put this feud to rest.”

  That dissolved any potential property dispute, but it didn’t change the fact that she’d discovered something important about her municipality and done nothing. “What about the scandal?”

  “From where I’m standing, no more an issue than when the diner stopped serving a short stack with their egg-and-bacon special.”

  How small town. Waffle Shack over whistle-stop politics any day.

  Emile put the issue to rest by moving on. Three more items of trash in, he hesitated, glanced back.

  “You’re the best mayor this town has ever seen. We ain’t about to lose you over something that’s already settled over a hundred and fifty years ago. Let us handle things at city hall. Put out a statement saying that I knew the history all along and you suppressed nothing. Take a day or two, hear?”

  Gretchen nodded.

  Emile took the trash bag from her hand and motioned for her to get going with a wag of his chin.

  Hands empty, she brushed them together and looked around. The curtain of night had peeled back to reveal the eastern sky, the start of a new day that couldn’t possibly be any worse than the previous one. She hadn’t taken a single day off since being elected. Her first thought wasn’t to visit her mother; that would be moving back. Emile had christened this a new day. New narrative, new friendships, new possibilities.

  She spotted Wes taking down the scaffolding of the makeshift stage. Crossing the field, she steeled herself against glances, whispers, something to indicate the town had lost faith in their leader. Aside from a few “Morning, mayor” greetings, eve
rything was business as usual. She explained it away as the rooster crowd: to bed before news time, up with the rooster. None the wiser.

  Wes slowed his work when she drew near. She was fully aware that the secret she’d kept hadn’t only impacted Chase—the entire Meier clan deserved better. With dirty hands, muddy boots, and eyelids as swollen as grapes, it was hard to put on her mayoral face, so she aimed for Gretchen instead.

  “I want to apologize, Wes. To your whole family. I should have come to you and your brothers the moment I learned there was a discrepancy about the original parcel of land. I was wrong. I hope you’ll forgive me.”

  Wes nodded. “Thank you.”

  “I was also hoping you can tell me where Chase is. He hasn’t picked up one of my calls. I’ve left him messages and apologized sixteen ways to Sunday, so I feel pretty sure he won’t pick up now, when I need to tell him that Emile Pickford wants to outright give him the land on Main and put things to rest between your families for good. We all think the distillery’s a pretty good idea, and we want him to come back.”

  Wes’s gaze scattered about, no doubt processing a hundred fifty years of bad juju coming to its peaceful conclusion. When the moment stretched long, his wife, Livie, joined them, gave him a sweet little rub on his shoulder, and answered for him.

  “Chase said something about a rodeo in Corpus Christi. Some bull named Stalin’s Assassin. We don’t know much else. We haven’t heard from him since he packed up and headed out yesterday.”

  Had Gretchen not smelled like a minor offender in ankle cuffs and an orange jumpsuit on the side of a broiling Texas highway, she would have hugged Livie. She thanked her, profusely, rather embarrassingly—so awkward when she wasn’t being mayor, but she was trying.

  As Gretchen, there was so much to do today. A shower. A suitcase filled with enough clothes for a day to two, as Emile had said, and something fitting for a rodeo. And of course, she had to gas up the Prius. Corpus Christi was nearly two hundred miles from Close Call. There was no way she was running out of fuel, today of all days.